Every day is now Day One — I’ve just joined AWS

I recently wrote about leaving my previous job as a CTO at Movivo

I am now an ex-CTO

and have been reasonably quiet for the past few weeks on Medium and Twitter (you may or may not have noticed), simply because I needed a bit of a break and because I wasn’t sure quite how to reveal the news.

Yesterday, I started at AWS as a Senior Developer Advocate for Serverless.

That means I’ll be working alongside Chris Munns and the rest of the team to help all you developers out there doing Lambda and everything Serverless on AWS to be even more awesome.

I’ll also be at re:Invent next week although I have a suspicion that my feet won’t be touching the floor much! I doubt I’ll speak to everyone who has already asked to meet up (just managing expectations!).

Why AWS?

I have been an AWS user for 10 years. I can remember when EC2 was only one or two instance types.

But I can also remember the moment that Lambda was announced. I can remember that moment watching the live stream whilst doing some other work.

I stopped.

I literally stopped typing and stared at the screen and watched.

Because I got it straight away.

And as this blog post shows, even at the beginning, it was all about being a “zero-administration compute platform”.

And Lambda is why I’ve joined AWS.

Because I think that Lambda is the future of cloud, and the future of development for both startups and enterprise.

I have spent the last few years talking about Lambda, and encouraging the community as much as I can, whilst having a day job. And I’ve loved doing it, because the community is just a little bit of awesome.

And when the opportunity came up to make it my actual day job, I felt like the role was almost made for me.

I asked a few trusted people whether they thought it would be a good role for me and (almost) every single one said that it was the perfect job for me.

So I’m jumping in with both feet!

But that’s not the only reason I’ve joined AWS.

It’s *always* Day One

While working out whether AWS was the right fit for me, I read this blog post:

What I Learned From Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter

Two things jumped out at me from this.

1. It’s always Day One

This is my favourite thing about Amazon culture. I’ve always been nervous about joining big corporate companies, simply because I’ve been so used to startups.

But this one sentence is why I wanted to join AWS.

It’s so very “startup”

And there’s something remarkable about it given the size of the company and the constant innovation and service releases by AWS.

But I like it, because I’m very “startup”

2. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on

I’ve watched AWS over recent years quite carefully, and have watched from the outside, and what I’ve seen I’ve been really impressed with.

It’s not about getting it right all the time, because nobody gets it right all the time.

It’s about always striving to do better.

And from what I’ve seen, AWS do this.

And as someone said to me it’s a lot to do with “run fast in that direction”

I like that idea.

Again, it’s very “startup”

and I like it, because I’m very “startup”

Day One Number 2

I write this on day two of my AWS job, but it’s still Day One.

It’s always Day One.

And I cannot wait for re:Invent, simply because I’ve seen behind the curtain.

And it’s awesome.

See you on Day One!